I’ll get this over with quickly. The bell rang at some ridiculous time like 5am. I assembled the underwater camera quickly and we jumped in the water in morning darkness to search for hammerheads. At about 20ft under, I noticed the camera case was slowly flooding. I ran(?) back to the surface and got the camera out of the case as quickly as possible and got the boat’s attention to come back and pick it up from me. So first bummer of the trip: no hammerhead
photos. After the dive, we found the camera functional, but with water spots clouding the lens. Oh, the horror! How sore my arm is from Mary punching me.Here we entered the frantic and desperate times that have made us so well acquainted with the inside of our camera that we could easily get jobs with Canon.
Cleaning the lens by flooding it with freshwater didn’t work, so our next desperate move was to swap the lens assembly with the jammed up one that we had replaced in Bangkok. Yeah, I’m a geek. I kept the busted lens assembly because it looked cool. This worked unreliably for a few dives, but the original busted gear problem eventually beat us. For our second trick, Mary disassembled the delicate lens assembly with hopes to clean the individual lenses inside.
Wow, what a job, but she did it. Unfortunately, we couldn’t quite get this evil jigsaw puzzle back together. So – we’ve got no photos of any of the good stuff we saw. Oh well, at least we got to see it all and you don’t have to suffer through 200 manta and whaleshark photos.